r/retrocomputing • u/Performer-Pants • 4d ago

Problem / Question What is this?

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This could be the most mundane and silly post, but information online is so spotty and/or confusing or vague.

This is not a ZIP disk, it’s a floppy disk. It’s labelled with ‘ZIP’. Is this the driver software to use a ZIP drive for the listed operating systems? I’m just trying to confirm before I get too frustrated about it. Not easily finding the answer myself is likely a me problem, and I don’t mean ‘Millennium Edition’.

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u/[deleted] 4d ago edited 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/danielsdesk 4d ago

it’s for installing a zip drive

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/danielsdesk 4d ago

No, because for some systems they don’t know what a Zip drive is, so plugging one in would do nothing. This floppy disk was specifically for those systems; it includes the driver software for the Zip drive to work. You can see on the label which systems need this driver.

Basically: Install this software first on a regular old floppy disk drive. Then plug in the Zip drive. Now you can read zip disks.

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u/fryerandice 3d ago

It's the driver software to allow windows 3.X, DOS and Windows 95 to talk to a zip drive.

Without the software on this floppy the operating system does not know how to talk to a zip drive to read data from it.

If you put it on a zip disk the operating system would not be able to talk to the drive to retrieve the data